There is a great piece by
Frank Rich over at the Times website (registration required) about the growing amount of "news" presented to the public.
As Rich puts it:
Real journalism may be reeling, but faux journalism rocks. As an entertainment category in the cultural marketplace, it may soon rival reality TV and porn. Television is increasingly awash in fake anchors delivering fake news, some of them far more trenchant than real anchors delivering real news.
This is one of the major ways that the corporate control of the media is undermining the very roots of democracy. For every one wonderful updating of political satire, like the Daily Show, there are ten commercials or productions of rethuglican propaganda masquerading as news. In some cases, the same programs or segments function as both:
This phenomenon has been good news for the Bush administration, which has responded to the growing national appetite for fictionalized news by producing a steady supply of its own. Of late it has gone so far as to field its own pair of Jayson Blairs, hired at taxpayers' expense: Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia, the "reporters" who appeared in TV "news" videos distributed by the Department of Health and Human Services to local news shows around the country. The point of these spots which were broadcast whole or in part as actual news by more than 50 stations in 40 states was to hype the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit as an unalloyed Godsend to elderly voters. They are part of a year-plus p.r. campaign, which, with its $124 million budget, would dwarf in size most actual news organizations.>
The government also informed us that Ms. Ryan was no impostor but an actual "freelance journalist." The Columbia Journalism Review, investigating further, found that Ms. Ryan's past assignments included serving as a TV shill for pharmaceutical companies in infomercials plugging FluMist and Excedrin. Given that drug companies may also be the principal beneficiaries of the new Medicare law, she is nothing if not consistent in her journalistic patrons.
The real problem is: how do we stop it? How does the Kerry campaign combat it? After all, when everything could be a lie, then how can anybody assert that their version isn't a lie? The know-nothingism of the right has created a chaotic underlayment where everything is spin. If it is all spin, then we have nothing left but faith. We know how good they are at appealing to faith. They are masters at spinning myths:
There's no point in bothering with actual news people anyway, when you can make up your own story and make it stick, whatever the filter might have to say about it. No fake news story has become more embedded in our culture than the administration's account of its actions on 9/11. As The Wall Street Journal reported on its front page this week just as the former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke was going public with his parallel account many of this story's most familiar details are utter fiction. Mr. Bush's repeated claim that one of his "first acts" of that morning was to put the military on alert is false. So are the president's claims that he watched the first airplane hit the World Trade Center on TV that morning. (No such video yet existed.) Nor was Air Force One under threat as Mr. Bush flew around the country, delaying his return to Washington.
Yet the fake narrative of 9/11 has been scrupulously maintained by the White House for more than two years. Although the administration has tried at every juncture to stonewall the 9/11 investigative commission, its personnel, including the president, had all the time in the world for the producer of a TV movie, Showtime's "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis." The result was a scenario that further rewrote the history of that day, stirring steroids into false tales of presidential derring-do. Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow, characterized one of the movie's many elisions in Salon. To show the president continuing to sit and read with elementary school kids "while people like my husband were burning alive inside the World Trade Center towers," she wrote, "would run counter to Karl Rove's art direction and grand vision."
The only way to combat this is to go back to our roots. What do we on the left stand for? For me, its:
Progressive - Human beings are rational and creative. Reason, art and open-ended conversation can be used by people to better their own lives and those of their families.
Liberal - Human beings, in the pursuit of the betterment of their lives, can develop instituions and communities to work together to provide growth and security for their neighbors and communities.
Democrat - Communities work most effiently when they develop institutions of Government, where open discourse can help to find the right solutions to problems, while still containing mechanisms to change course through debate and elections.